News

CN06 - Demain’s dialogues: awakenings in future lands

Participation

Conveners: Nik Baerten, Virginia Tassinari, & Elisa Bertolotti

Design and foresight share an in-between space of potentialities, of worlds that might become. To engage with this space, storytelling serves as a powerful instrument to make collective sense of new conditions, needs, opportunities and possibilities shaped by the outlines of potential futures. This conversation is framed as an immersive storytelling experience, an experiment in performative design approaches to worldbuilding in foresight. Through artefacts and the de/ recontextualisation of participant’s identities, roles and relationships, basic scaffolding for a potential future world is given. By means of scripted interactions between participants, further detail is added to the characters and systemic functioning of the future world. ‘Demain’s dialogues’ is a double edged conversation. On the one hand it is a design-driven, performative method to grow the detailed contents of a future world seeded through fragments. On the other hand it is a reflection on that very method, from the perspective of the participants within this experiment. How can live, improvisational roleplays simulate more profound future personas and deeper worldbuilding in a collaborative way, enhancing empathy building with (people in) future worlds? How diversely do people envision the future world as it unravels from their introspective conversations?